Spam on your blog means a few things. On a positive note, people are finding you and that’s a good thing. It doesn’t sound like such a good thing when it becomes a pain to manage but one thing is for sure, your blog is valuable enough to make spammers want to utilise your site. They’ll post trackback spam and bogus comments filled with hyperlinks to their adult websites. You can’t let it go on but there are things you can do.
If you are using Wordpress for your blog, consider using the Askimet plug-in. This will catch a big portion of your spam and save you considerably on moderating time. You can also set your your comments as moderated only which will stop the spam before it’s published. You can quickly view the comments and manually approve the ones you want to let through. You can set up some blogs so that commenters are approved automatically after they have one approved comment but be careful about this because some crafty spammers can take advantage of this loophole and post one useful comment only to come back later and try to post spam on your site. You might need to de-approve some commenters.
All in all, you want to be choosy about who is allowed to link to your site because association with certain kinds of sites can bring your own search engine ranking down. The good news is that search engines seem to be finding your site and people think it’s valuable enough to try and capitalise on your success!
(Image courtesy of sxc.hu)
